Tech 9: Stories From the Week You Need To Read Right Now

This week the world turned to San Francisco in eager anticipation of another utopian Apple product. Instead, Tim Cook bequeathed an iPad .08 inches thinner than last year’s model. To help fill in that hollow feeling this announcement no doubt left, here are some amazing stories you might have missed in the impenetrable thicket of anticlimactic Apple revelations.

Michael Thomsen is Complex's tech columnist. He has written for Slate, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, n+1, Billboard, and is author of Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men. He tweets often at @mike_thomsen.

When Silk Road was taken offline by the FBI earlier this year, it seemed like the tide was turning against online drug hookups. One Vice freelancer found that Instagram may be a drug oasis waiting to take Silk Road's place. Fletcher Babb was interested in trying Lean, a fabled cocktail of Sprite, coedine, and promethazine, an anti-nausea medication, which when mixed together produces a powerful high. By searching through Instagram's hashtags for various slang terms for the concoction, Babb was able to locate a number of potential dealers to help hook him up with the over the counter ingredients. Unfortunately, drug dealers don't always like reporters snitching on their turf and one of them allegedly threatened to kill Babb for his story.

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Half a century ago, a generation of wonder-eyed boys and girls went to movie theaters to fill their imaginations. Today, kids fall in marvel at the mathematics of monster evolution in Pokémon games. Writing for Scientific American, Kyle Hill reports on his romance with the pocket-dwelling creatures, gathering a huge number of statistics to measure attack, defense, and growth statistics of all the possible Pokémons one can start a game with, hopefully proving once and for all which one is best. Amid some reader controversy, Hill claims that Squirtle trumps all for his defense, ability to learn rare attacks, and high starting stats.

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People have become over-familiar with the idea that the government is collecting information on them, but this week a DC-commuter and former MoveOn.org director Tom Matzzie found himself snooping on the government. Matzzie found himself sitting near Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director who oversaw major expansions in the government's surveillance programs, on his morning train commute. Hayden was on the phone with a reporter reiterating a demand to be cited only as a "former senior admin official," Matzzie live-tweeted one of the country's chief spooks leaking inside information about the country's spying programs, an unusual but funny reminder that the tools of surveillance can be applied to anyone under the right circumstances.

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Few people want to know when they're going to die, but it's energizing to think about just how differently we all might live if we knew our own death dates. A new Kickstarter project proposes a watch called Tikker, which will leave its users at the precipice of just that question. After filling out a general health questionnaire and entering one's age, the watch calculates a best estimate for how long a user has left to live. In place of Greenwich Mean Time, the watch winds down in reverse, counting off the seconds, minutes, and hours one has left to live. It's a vertiginous shift of perspective. When you go to sleep at night you won't think about waking up in eight hours, but having eight fewer hours left to live in the morning. Sleep tight.

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Warfare in the last decade has increasingly been fought at a distance, by remote controlled aircraft, and a growing number of soldiers are fighting and killing in front of the computer screen. Brandon Bryant is one of the first American soldiers to have had his entire career, from recruitment to the present, defined by the drone. He's profiled in this month's GQ, which chronicles the psychological trauma his drone piloting eventually lead to. Bryant suffered a powerful sense of guilt and eventually became suicidal. His last resort was to make a public confession to the press about the emotional trauma this strangely modern form of fighting had had on him. "I really have no fear," Bryant told GQ's Matthew Power. "It's more like I've had a soul crushing experience. An experience that I never thought I'd have. I was never prepared to take a life."

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In the New Yorker, Maria Konnikova investigates the possible psychological impact of removing comments from the Internet after Popular Science's decision to take them out of all their online stories. "In a phenomenon known as shared reality, our experience of something is affected by whether or not we will share it socially," Konnikova writes. "Take away comments entirely, and you take away some of that shared reality, which is why we often want to share our comments in the first place. We want to believe that others will read and react to our ideas."

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Alright, so there was one story about Apple this week worth reading. Asymco's Horace Dediu looks at how Apple has embraced the idea of giving away its operating systems for free in order to hook customers to its products. With iPhone, the company has distributed yearly iOS updates free of charge, and this year's upgrade to OSX Mavericks marked the first moment for the home computer OS to go gratis. Dediu argues "the logic for Apple is that usage of the products determines their value and therefor placing powerful software in the hands of more users means they will value the entire system more. This leads to the notion of greater 'stickiness' or 'lock-in' but also to higher satisfaction and loyalty, rate of upgrades and even more third party purchases and yet more usage."

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Behind happy stories about married couples who met online, there is a pervasive sense of futility to the online dating world. A person uses OKCupid and Tinder out of a belief that something better is out there, and then discovers that strangers are more often worse than better. A new Pew report, picked up by Quartz's Leo Mirani corroborates the many of these suspicions, finding more than half of the online daters surveyed reported dates with people who had serious misrepresented themselves in their profiles. And one in three reported encountering people they'd already known or dated. Maybe a less nerve wracking way to date will come from learning to better appreciate the people you already know than constantly shuffling through the strangers that you haven't yet met.

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One of the great American myths of the last few decades has been of the hero teacher who helps usher teens into adulthood with midnight poetry readings or kung-fu philosophy. One school in Mexico is challenging this idea by teaching students without any formal pedagogy. Instead of lecturing his kids for hours at a time, Sergio Juárez Correa leaves them with a few open-ended questions and an Internet-connected computer. Then he leaves them alone. Correa has found that his students are far more capable of teaching themselves about enormously complicated ideas on their own, without homework and constant micromanagement. It may be better to let young minds shape themselves than to try and force them into a one-size-fits-all educational mold.

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